Jane MayerThe Dark Side:
The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into
a
War on American IdealsDoubleday

CITATION

A few days after September
11, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney commented that,
in the life-and-death fight against terrorism, the administration
would need to proceed on what he called the "dark
side." Jane Mayer brilliantly and meticulously
documents what this meant—how the government and
its lawyers gutted vital principles of human rights
and condoned torture. Her book forcefully raises one
of the most urgent issues of our time: state misconduct
in the name of national security.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jane Mayer is a staff writer
for The New Yorker and the coauthor of two
bestselling books, Landslide and Strange
Justice. Based in Washington, D.C., she writes
about politics for the magazine, and has been covering
the war on terror. Recent subjects include Alberto Mora
and the Pentagon’s secret torture policy, how
the United States outsources torture (rendition), the
prison at Guantánamo Bay, and the legality of
C.I.A. interrogations. She has also written about George
W. Bush, the bin Laden family, Karl Rove, and the television
show “24.”

Before joining The New
Yorker, Mayer was for twelve years a reporter at
the Wall Street Journal. In 1984, she became
the Journal’s first female White House
correspondent. She was also a war correspondent and
a foreign correspondent for the paper. Among other stories,
she covered the bombing of the American barracks in
Beruit, the Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin
Wall, and the final days of Communism in the Soviet
Union. She was nominated twice by the Journal
for a Pulitzer Prize in the feature-writing category.

Before joining the Journal,
in 1982 Mayer worked as a metropolitan reporter for
the Washington Star. She began her career in
journalism as a stringer for Time magazine
while still a student in college. She has also written
for a number of other publications, including the Washington
Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New
York Review of Books.

Mayer is the co-author of two
books. “Strange Justice,” written
with Jill Abramson, was published in 1994 by Houghton
Mifflin and was a finalist for the 1994 National Book
Award for nonfiction. Her first book, “Landslide:
The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988,”
co-authored by Doyle McManus, was a best-selling account
of the Reagan White House’s involvement in the
Iran-Contra affair.

Mayer, who was born in New
York, graduated from Yale in 1977 and continued her
studies at Oxford. She lives in Washington with her
husband and daughter.

ABOUTH
THE BOOK (from the publisher)

In
the days following September 11, the most powerful people
in the country were panic-stricken. The decisions about
how to combat terrorists and strengthen national security
were made in a state of utter chaos and fear, but the
key players, Vice President Dick Cheney and his powerful,
secretive adviser David Addington, used the crisis to
further a long-held agenda to enhance presidential powers
to a degree never known in U.S. history.

The Dark Side is a
riveting narrative account of how the U.S. made terrible
decisions in the pursuit of terrorists–decisions
that not only violated the Constitution, but also hampered
the pursuit of Al Qaeda. In gripping detail, acclaimed
New Yorker writer and bestselling author Jane Mayer
relates specific cases, shown in real time against the
larger tableau of Washington, looking at the intelligence
gained–or not–and the price paid. In all
cases, whatever the short-term gains, there were incalculable
losses in terms of moral standing, our country’s
place in the world, and its sense of itself. The
Dark Side chronicles one of the mostdisturbing
chapters in American history, one that will serve as
the lasting legacy of the George W. Bush presidency.

America should go “not
abroad in search of monsters to destroy. . . . She might
become the dictatress of the world: she would be no
longer the ruler of her own spirit.”–John Quincy Adams, An Address . . .
Celebrating the Anniversary of Independence, at the
City of Washington on the Fourth of July 1821

If anyone in America should have been prepared to respond
to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it ought
to have been Vice President Dick Cheney. For decades
before the planes hit the Pentagon and World Trade Center,
Cheney had been secretly practicing for doomsday.

During the 1980s, while serving
as a Republican congressman from Wyoming and a rising
power in the conservative leadership in Congress, Cheney
secretly participated in one of the most highly classi?ed,
top-secret programs of the Reagan Administration, a
simulation of survival scenarios designed to ensure
the smooth continuity of the U.S. government in the
event of all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
Every year, usually during congressional recesses, Cheney
would disappear in the dead of the night. He left without
explanation to his wife, Lynne Vincent Cheney, who was
given merely a phone number where he could be reached
in the event of emergency. Along with some four or ?ve
dozen federal of?cials, Cheney would pretend for several
weeks to be chief of staff to a designated substitute
“president,” bivouacked in some remote location
in the United States.

As James Mann reveals in The
Vulcans, his rich intellectual history of the neoconservative
brain trust that has guided Bush foreign policy, the
exercise tried to re-create some of the anticipated
hardships of surviving a nuclear holocaust. Accommodations
were Spartan and cuisine was barely adequate. Civilian
communications systems were presumed destroyed. The
challenge was to ensure civil order and control over
the military in the event that the elected president
and vice president, and much of the executive branch,
were decimated. The Constitution, of course, spells
out the line of succession. If the president and vice
president are indisposed, then power passes ?rst to
the Speaker of the House, and next to the president
pro tempore of the Senate. But in a secret executive
order, President Reagan, who was deeply concerned about
the Soviet threat, amended the process for speed and
clarity. The secret order established a means of re-creating
the executive branch without informing Congress that
it had been sidestepped, or asking for legislation that
would have made the new “continuity-of-government”
plan legally legitimate. Cheney, a proponent of expansive
presidential powers, was evidently unperturbed by this
oversight.

Mann and others have suggested
that these doomsday drills were a dress rehearsal for
Cheney’s calm, commanding performance on 9/11.
It was not the ?rst time he had stared into the abyss.
One eyewitness, who kept a diary, said that inside the
Presidential Emergency Operations Command, or PEOC,
a hardened command center several hundred feet under
the by-then-evacuated White House, Cheney never broke
a sweat as he juggled orders to shoot down any additional
incoming hijacked planes, coordinated efforts with other
cabinet members, most particularly the Directors of
the FBI and CIA, and resolved issues such as how to
avoid charges of taking hostage two visiting foreign
heads of state, from Australia and Lithuania, after
all air traf?c had been shut down.

Six weeks after the attacks
on New York and Washington, the Bush Administration
had successfully restored calm, reassured the ?nancial
markets, and rallied the sympathies and support of much
of the world. But once again the White House was plunged
into a state of controlled panic.
On October 17, 2001, a white powder that had been sent
through the U.S. mail to Senate Majority Leader Tom
Daschle’s of?ce in the Capitol was positively
identi?ed. Scienti?c analysis showed it to be an unusually
dif?cult to obtain and lethally potent form of the deadly
bacterial poison anthrax. This news followed less than
ten days after the death in Florida of a victim in another
mysterious anthrax attack. The anthrax spores in the
letter to Daschle were so professionally re?ned, the
Central Intelligence Agency believed the powder must
have been sent by an experienced terrorist organization,
most probably Al Qaeda, as a sequel to the group’s
September 11 attacks. During a meeting of the White
House’s National Security Council that day, Cheney,
who was sitting in for the President because Bush was
traveling abroad, urged everyone to keep this in?ammatory
speculation secret.

At the time, no one, not even
America’s best-informed national security leaders,
really knew anything for sure about what sorts of threats
loomed, or from where. The only certainty shared by
virtually the entire American intelligence community
in the fall of 2001 was that a second wave of even more
devastating terrorist attacks on America was imminent.
In preparation, the CIA had compiled a list of likely
targets ranging from movie studios–whose heads
were warned by the Bush Administration to take precautions–to
sports arenas and corporate headquarters. Topping the
list was the White House.

The next day, the worst of
these fears seemed realized. On October 18, 2001, an
alarm in the White House went off. Chillingly, the warning
signal wasn’t a simple ?re alarm triggered by
the detection of smoke. It was a sensitive, specialized
sensor, designed to alert anyone in the vicinity that
the air they were breathing had been contaminated by
potentially lethal radioactive, chemical, or biological
agents. Everyone who had entered the Situation Room
that day was believed to have been exposed, and that
included Cheney. “They thought there had been
a nerve attack,” a former administration of?cial,
who was sworn to secrecy about it, later con?ded. “It
was really, really scary. They thought that Cheney was
already lethally infected.” Facing the possibility
of his own death, the Vice President nonetheless calmly
reported the emergency to the rest of the National Security
Council.

Members of the National Security
Council were all too well aware of the seriousness of
the peril they were facing. At Cheney’s urging,
they had received a harrowing brie?ng just a few weeks
earlier about the possibility of biological attack.
His attention had been drawn to the subject by a war
game called Dark Winter conducted in the summer before
that simulated the effects of an outbreak of smallpox
in America. After the September 11 attacks, Cheney’s
chief of staff,

I. Lewis “Scooter”
Libby, screened a video of the Dark Winter exercise
for Cheney, showing that the United States was virtually
defenseless against smallpox or any other biological
attack. Cheney in particular was so stricken by the
potential for attack that he insisted that the rest
of the National Security Council undergo a gruesome
brie?ng on it on September 20, 2001. When the White
House sensor registered the presence of such poisons
less than a month later, many, including Cheney, believed
a nightmare was unfolding. “It was a really nerve-jangling
time,” the former of?cial said.

In time, the Situation Room
alarm turned out to be false. But on October 22, the
Secret Service reported that it had found what it believed
to be additional anthrax traces on an automated letter-opening
device used on White House mail. By then, Cheney had
convinced the President to support a $1.6 billion bioterrorism-preparedness
program. Cheney argued that every citizen in the country
should be vaccinated against smallpox.

During the ten days after the
Vice President’s scare, threats of mortal attack
were nonetheless so frequent, and so terrifying, that
on October 29 Cheney quietly insisted upon absenting
himself from the White House to what was described as
“a secure, undisclosed location”–one
of several Cold War—era nuclear-hardened subterranean
bunkers built during the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations,
the nearest of which were located hundreds of feet below
bedrock in places such as Mount Weather, in Virginia’s
Blue Ridge Mountains, and along the Maryland-Pennsylvania
border not far from Camp David.
In a subterranean bunker crammed with communications
equipment and government-issue metal desks, Cheney and
other rotating cabinet members took turns occupying
what was archly referred to as “The Commander
in Chief’s Suite.”

Of?cials who worked in the
White House and other sensitive posts with access to
raw intelligence ?les during the fall of 2001 say it
is nearly impossible to exaggerate the sense of mortal
and existential danger that dominated the thinking of
the upper rungs of the Bush Administration during those
months.
“They thought they were going to get hit again.
They convinced themselves that they were facing a ticking
time bomb,” recalled Roger Cressey, who then headed
what was known as the Terrorist Threats Sub-Group of
the National Security Council.

Counterterrorism experts knew
that Al Qaeda’s members had in the recent past
made efforts to obtain nuclear and other horri?c weapons
of mass destruction in order to commit murder on an
even greater scale. Unlike earlier enemies of America,
they targeted innocent civilians and fought clandestinely
with inhuman disregard for life. Other foes had been
better organized and more powerful, but none had struck
as great a blow behind the lines in America, nor spread
a greater sense of vulnerability in the population.
Under the circumstances, Cressey admitted, “I
?rmly expected to get hit again too. It seemed highly
probable.”
The sense of fear within the White House was understandable,
but it was intensi?ed by what was supposed to be a valuable
new intelligence tool introduced after September 11,
what came to be known as the “Top Secret Codeword/Threat
Matrix.” Having underestimated Al Qaeda before
the attacks, Bush and Cheney took aggressive steps to
ensure that they would never get similarly blindsided
again. In the days immediately after the attacks, he
and Cheney demanded to see all available raw intelligence
reports concerning additional possible threats to America
on a daily basis. Cheney had long been a skeptic about
the CIA’s skills, and was particularly insistent
on reviewing the data himself. “The mistake,”
Cressey concluded later, “was not to have proper
analysis of the intelligence before giving it to the
President. There was no ?lter. Most of it was garbage.
None of it had been corroborated or screened.

But it went directly to the
President and his advisers, who are not intelligence
experts. That’s when mistakes got made.”
Others who saw the same intelligence reports found the
experience mind-altering. It was “like being stuck
in a room listening to Led Zeppelin music,” said
Jim Baker, former head of the Counsel in the Department
of Justice’s Of?ce of Intelligence Policy and
Review. Readers suffered “sensory overload”
and became “paranoid.” Former Deputy Attorney
General James Comey believed that the cumulative effect
turned national security concerns into “an obsession.”

A sense of constant danger
followed Cheney everywhere. When he commuted to his
White House of?ce from the vice presidential residence,
he was chauffeured in an armored motorcade that varied
its route to foil possible attackers. On the backseat
behind Cheney rested a duffel bag stocked with a gas
mask and a biochemical surival suit. Rarely did he travel
without a medical doctor in tow.
Cheney managed to make light of these macabre arrangements,
joking about evading “The Jackal” by varying
his routines, and teasing an old friend that, alas,
he had too little survival equipment to be able to share
his. Some of those around Cheney wondered if the attacks,
perhaps in combination with his medical problems, had
exacerbated his natural pessimism. An old family friend
found him changed after September 11, “more steely,
as if he was preoccupied by terrible things he couldn’t
talk about.” Brent Scowcroft, a lifelong acquaintance,
told The New Yorker, “I don’t know him anymore.”
In the view of some detractors, such as Lawrence Wilkerson,
the chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin
Powell, “Cheney was traumatized by 9/11. The poor
guy became paranoid.”
From the start of the administration, Cheney had con?dently
assumed the national security portfolio for a president
with virtually no experience in the area. But Al Qaeda’s
attacks exposed a gaping shortcoming in the Vice President’s
thinking. The Soviet Union, whose threat had preoccupied
Cheney and other doomsday planners in the 1980s, was
gone. In its place another, more intangible danger had
arisen. No one in the Bush Administration, including
Cheney, had had the foresight or imagination to see
Bin Laden’s plot unfolding.

With the notable exception
of Richard Clarke, the long-serving head of counterterrorism
at the National Security Council, and a few counterterrorism
experts at the CIA and FBI, terrorism hadn’t ranked
anywhere near the top of the new administration’s
national security concerns. Later, a number of top of?cials,
including CIA Director George Tenet, would offer evidence
that they had been keenly focused on the threat from
Bin Laden before the attacks. If so, none succeeded
in getting the President and Vice President’s
attention.

When Al Qaeda struck, Cheney
and the other hardliners who had spent decades militating
for a more martial and aggressive foreign policy were
caught off guard. Frozen in a Cold War—era mind-set,
they overlooked threats posed not by great armed nation-states,
but by small, lithe rogue groups waging “asymmetric”
warfare.

The Bush White House could
have demanded an instant review of how they had been
so badly surprised, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did
after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the results would
not have been ?attering. But instead of trying to learn
from what had essentially been a colossal bureaucratic
failure, combined with inattention and a lack of political
will at the top, the Bush White House deferred the focus
elsewhere.

The lesson for Bush and Cheney
was that terrorists had struck at the United States
because they saw the country as soft. Bush worried that
the nation was too “materialistic, hedonistic,”
and that Bin Laden “didn’t feel threatened”
by it. Confronted with a new enemy and their own intelligence
failure, he and Cheney turned to some familiar conservative
nostrums that had preoccupied the far right wing of
the Republican Party since the Watergate era. There
was too much international law, too many civil liberties,
too many constraints on the President’s war powers,
too many rights for defendants, and too many rules against
lethal covert actions. There was also too much openness
and too much meddling by Congress and the press.

Cheney in particular had been
cha?ng against the post-Watergate curbs that had been
imposed on the president’s powers since the mid1970s,
when he had served as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff.
As Vice President, Cheney had already begun to strengthen
the power of the presidency by aggressively asserting
executive privilege, most notably on his secrecy-enshrouded
energy task force. He’d told Bush, who later repeated
the line, that if nothing else they must leave the of?ce
stronger than they found it. Now Cheney saw the terrorist
threat in such catastrophic terms that his end, saving
America from possible extinction, justi?ed virtually
any means. As Wilkerson, Powell’s former Chief
of Staff who went on to teach National Security Affairs
at George Washington University, put it, “He had
a single-minded objective in black and white, that American
security was paramount to everything else. He thought
that perfect security was achievable. I can’t
fault the man for wanting to keep America safe. But
he was willing to corrupt the whole country to save
it.”
Whether the White House fears were rational will long
be debated. But it was in this feverish atmosphere that
a new system of law was devised to vanquish what Bush
described as a new kind of enemy in “a war unlike
any other.”

Beginning almost immediately
after September 11, 2001, Cheney saw to it that some
of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers in the country,
working in secret in the White House and the United
States
Department of Justice, came up with legal justi?cations
for a vast expansion of the government’s power
in waging war on terror.

As part of that process, for
the ?rst time in its history, the United States sanctioned
government of?cials to physically and psychologically
torment U.S.-held captives, making torture the of?cial
law of the land in all but name.

The lawyers also authorized
other previously illegal practices, including the secret
capture and inde?nite detention of suspects without
charges. Simply by designating the suspects “enemy
combatants,” the President could suspend the ancient
writ of habeas corpus that guarantees a person the right
to challenge his imprisonment in front of a fair and
independent authority. Once in U.S. custody, the President’s
lawyers said, these suspects could be held incommunicado,
hidden from their families and international monitors
such as the Red Cross, and subjected to unending abuse,
so long as it didn’t meet the lawyers’ own
de?nition of torture. And they could be held for the
duration of the war against terrorism, a struggle in
which victory had never been clearly de?ned.

Few would argue against safeguarding
the nation. But in the judgment of at least one of the
country’s most distinguished presidential scholars,
the legal steps taken by the Bush Administration in
its war against terrorism were a quantum leap beyond
earlier blots on the country’s history and traditions:
more signi?cant than John Adams’s Alien and Sedition
Acts, than Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus
during the Civil War, than the imprisonment of Americans
of Japanese descent during World War II. Collectively,
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued, the Bush Administration’s
extralegal counterterrorism program presented the most
dramatic, sustained, and radical challenge to the rule
of law in American history.

Over a lunch at a genteel Upper
East Side French restaurant in Manhattan in 2006, the
year before he died, Schlesinger, a liberal Democrat
but also an admirer of muscular foreign policy, chose
his words slowly and carefully. When asked what he thought
of President Bush’s policy on torture, he peered
over his glasses and paused. Schlesinger’s The
Imperial Presidency had described Richard Nixon as pushing
the outer limits of abuse of presidential power. Later,
his book The Cycles of American History had placed these
excesses in a continuum of pendulum swings. With his
trademark bow tie askew, Schlesinger considered, and
?nally said, “No position taken has done more
damage to the American reputation in the world–ever.”

While there was nothing new
about torture, its authorization by Bush Administration
lawyers represented a dramatic break with the past.
As early as the Revolutionary War, General George Washington
vowed that, unlike the British, who tortured enemy captives,
this new country in the New World would distinguish
itself by its humanity. In ?ghting to liberate the world
from Communism, Fascism, and Nazism, and working to
ameliorate global ignorance and poverty, America had
done more than any nation on earth to abolish torture
and other violations of human rights.

Yet, almost precisely on the
sixtieth anniversary of the famous war crimes tribunal’s
judgment in Nuremberg, which established what seemed
like an immutable principle, that legalisms and technicalities
could not substitute for individual moral choice and
conscience, America became the ?rst nation ever to authorize
violations of the Geneva Conventions. These international
treaties, many of which were hammered out by American
lawyers in the wake of the harrowing Nazi atrocities
of World War II, set an absolute, minimum baseline for
the humane treatment of all categories of prisoners
taken in almost all manner of international con?icts.
Rather than lining prisoners up in front of ditches
and executing them, or exterminating them in gas chambers,
or subjecting them to grueling physical hardships, all
enemy prisoners–even spies and saboteurs–were
from then on to be accorded some basic value simply
because they were human. America had long played a special
role as the world’s most ardent champion of these
fundamental rights; it was not just a signatory but
also the custodian of the Geneva Conventions, the original
signed copies of which resided in a vault at the State
Department.

Any fair telling of how America
came to sacri?ce so many cherished values in its ?ght
against terrorism has to acknowledge that the enemy
that the Bush Administration faced on September 11,
and which the country faces still, is both real and
terrifying. Often, those in power have felt they simply
had no good choices. But this country has in the past
faced other mortal enemies, equally if not more threatening,
without endangering its moral authority by resorting
to state-sanctioned torture. Other democratic nations,
meanwhile, have grappled with similar if not greater
threats from terrorism without undercutting their values
and laws.

But to understand the Bush
Administration’s self-destructive response to
September 11, one has to look particularly to Cheney,
the doomsday expert and unapologetic advocate of expanding
presidential power. Appearing on Meet the Press on the
?rst Sunday after the attacks, Cheney gave a memorable
description of how the administration viewed the continuing
threat and how it planned to respond.
“We’ll have to work sort of the dark side,
if you will,” Cheney explained in his characteristically
quiet and reassuring voice. “We’ve got to
spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world.
A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be
done quietly, without any discussion, using sources
and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies–if
we are going to be successful. That’s the world
these folks operate in. And, uh, so it’s going
to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal
basically, to achieve our objectives.”

Soon afterward, Cheney disappeared
from public view. But his in?uence had already begun
to shape all that followed.